In a world filled with technicians that use templates and egocentric “artists”, I’ve never been more convinced of the importance of good design.
On one hand, there are people who understand templates. The difficulty is the same as using stock photography. Its accessible to anyone who can pay. Its a cookie cutter approach. Its cheap, its fast, and rarely memorable. These technicians are adept at assembly and well matched for situations characterized by lower budgets, lower expectations, and vanilla-ism.
On the other hand, some designers view the web as a canvas for their talent resulting in personal agenda triumphing over client needs.
While artists have few boundaries, website design must help solve problems such as extending core brand values, providing engagement value, bringing intuitive navigation to help guide people with varied personas, and ultimately working in concert with architecture, functionality, and usability, as well as generate actions (downloading, form filling, chatting or calling). Not to mention working within boundaries of time, budget, technology, etc. etc. etc. With a painting you can go in a direction you feel like and it makes no discernible difference. With web design, its business and creativity.
And then there’s the small consideration that most marketing, advertising, and PR firms neglect – Internet marketing. Lovely sites that nobody visits are useless. But thats another story.
- Duncan Alney
by using templates im assuming you mean downloadable templates from other sites? I use a php template file when im coding a site, but the design template has come from my graphic designer.
Comment by neil on July 5, 2008 at 4:47 am